Category: Updates

In honour of this, Mutant Standard 0.2.5 is a party-focused update. It also brings even more quality improvements.

Party emoji

Confetti, sparkles, fireworks, explosions, cakes, it’s all in here.

Travel emoji

Most of Unicode’s train emoji are in this release, as well as various emoji relating to travel and places.

Unicode 11 smilies

All of the smilies that were added in Unicode 11 (this year’s Unicode emoji release) have been added.

Various small improvements

Various emoji have been reorganised to make them more predictable and make more sense. Certain emoji designs (mostly food emoji) have been improved.

No more incorrectly sized SVG emoji

Sometimes in releases there were little hitches in the production process that resulted in a few SVG emoji being larger than they should have been (ie 32x33px instead of 32x32px). Orxporter has now been updated with a size checking feature, so emoji with the wrong size can’t make it to the release stage anymore.

Shortcode and Codepoint changes

metro has been renamed to metro_sign (to make room for the metro train emoji in this release, which is called metro.)

Certain animals made in past releases have been given codepoints to correspond to the fact that Unicode 11.0 coincidentally added them too.

This is a huuuge maintenance and improvement update. I’m really proud of it and I’m so happy to share it with you all! ^w^

Lots of improved emoji

Many of the emoji have been altered or redesigned based around what I felt have been the strongest designs over the last 11 months, and also inspired by my recent foray into commission work.

So many emoji designs have been improved, by clearing rendering glitches or making sure there’s better stylistic consistency. Many emoji have been changed to feature fewer dark outlines and more subtle lighting effects, so your emoji will look cleaner and brighter.

Redesigned Smilies

All of the smilies have been redesigned to look softer, cuter and more expressive than ever. They now take up the entire canvas area and are much more readable at smaller resolutions.

Kittymojos

There are new cat smilies! Unlike the cat smilies in other other emoji sets, Mutant Standard’s are modelled after black cats. They seemed really fitting for the set as they have long been a powerful symbol in western countries representing outcasts, superstition and rebellion from the margins. (They’re also less likely to be adopted from animal shelters than other kinds of cats :C)

Better Shortcodes

Shortcodes have been made to be more consistent within the set and more familiar if you’ve been used to using other sets.

This particular update has been a long-time coming, it’s a major step forward for Mutant Standard and it’s required a major overhaul to how Mutant Standard emoji are produced and presented.

Most of this you can thank kiilas for, who is an excellent programmer and so much of this project is indebted to.

The exporter that I’ve been using to get emoji out in all the colours, sizes and formats has been replaced with a brand-new and much more powerful exporter called Orxporter. This will eventually be open source so if you know how to use a command line, you can use this tool too!

Codepoint packages

You can now download packages with codepoint-based filenames. This has been a long time coming and I thank you all for the wait!

As you might imagine, given my current situation, I’ve been kind of scatterbrained. I was in the middle of working on some emoji that are quite close to ready a day or so ago, but then I realised that I had lost track of what I already made (which is unusual for me, but this has been a much longer release cycle than usual), so I’ve decided to get everything I’ve already done locked in place with a new release before I continue finishing more emoji.

Aside from personal things, this release is quite a bit smaller than usual because a lot of stuff in this release was quite intensive (like extra hands, new colours and extended colours). I also just had to go with what I had the spoons to create, so the kinds of emoji I’ve made isn’t necessarily what was planned, and it’s going to be that way for quite a while atm.

This is going to be very wordy because I don’t have the spoons to make diagrams explaining the CM system at the moment, so bear with me.

I’d like to thank everyone for being so patient and supportive during this really shitty time in my life. I’ve been hoping that I’d reach the end of this tunnel sooner but as usual, my spoons are in much shorter supply than I would like u∆∆u, but I am on it as much as I can be in my present capacity. 💚